Liferay monitoring using Google Analytics

Liferay monitoring using Google Analytics

Liferay includes built-in support for Google Analytics, allowing administrators

to make use of Google’s tool set for analyzing site traffic data. When you sign

up for Google Analytics, a snippet of code is provided which needs to be added

to your web pages to allow Google’s system to register the page hit. It can be a

tedious process to add this code to every page on a site, especially if it’s a large

site and there is a lot of user-generated content.

is problem can be solved in Liferay by puing Google’s code into a custom

theme wrien specifically for the web site on which the portal is running. Doing

this, however, requires a theme developer to make specific changes to the theme

and it prevents users from using the many themes that are freely available for

Liferay “out of the box.”

Because of this, support for Google

Analytics has been built into Liferay,

and can be turned on through a simple

user interface. is allows Liferay

administrators to make use of

Google Analytics on a community by

community basis and turn it on and

off when needed.

To enable Google Analytics support,

go to Site Seings in the control

panel, and then select Analytics

on the right. You’ll see a very simple

form, pictured below.

Put your Google Analytics ID

(which should have been provided to you when you signed up for the service)

in the field and click Save. All the pages in the community you selected will

now have the Google Analytics code in them and will be tracked.

is is a fairly simple procedure, and it gives you the ability to take advantage

of some great tools to help you visualize who’s coming to your site and

from where. Next, we discuss some topics germane to maintaining your Liferay

installation as it’s used. Let’s start with backup.